What to Do BEFORE You Get a Neurodivergence Diagnosis

[00:00:00] Rachel: Chances are you are working with someone who’s neurodivergent in some way. Maybe they’ve got ADHD or autism or dyslexia. Maybe you identify as neurodivergent or you think you might be. Either way, people working in teams represent a whole spectrum of neurodiversity. And while we tend to diagnose disorders to identify so-called deficiencies, there are also incredible strengths that we can access.

[00:00:25] Rachel: And sometimes one symptom masks another one. So one person’s extroverted behavior might be another person’s autistic special interest in people.

[00:00:33] Rachel: This week. I’m really pleased to welcome neurodiversity specialist Matthew Bellinger back onto the podcast to talk about how we can embrace people with a whole spectrum of neurodiversity, and how we can support ourselves and other people to play to their strengths, rather than alienating them when they struggle.

[00:00:52] Rachel: This is not just about making allowances or lowering the bar, but making sure that the whole team can benefit from the unique abilities that every member can bring. Like every conversation with Matthew. I found this interview to be really insightful. It helped me understand some things that I never knew about and was a real eye-opener. You’re in for a treat.

[00:01:12] Rachel: If you’re in a high stress, high stakes, still blank medicine, and you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, burning out or getting out are not your only options. I’m Dr. Rachel Morris, and welcome to You Are Not a Frog

[00:01:29] Matthew: I’m Matthew Bellinger. I’m a neurodiversity and innovation specialist.

[00:01:33] Rachel: Lovely to have you back on the podcast. Matthew. Matthew was on a while back

[00:01:38] Matthew: It was a while

[00:01:38] Rachel: think it was a while back, and we’ve since repeated the episode because it’s been so popular. It’s reached all the different ends of the world. We hear it’s very popular in Australia and lots of other places. Um, because I think what Matthew doesn’t really know about neurodiversity probably isn’t, isn’t worth knowing. You made it sort of real specialism. And added to that, we are both neurodivergent ourselves, aren’t we? Um, Matthew, how would you describe yourself?

[00:02:03] Matthew: Well, I’m, I’m an autistic, dyslexic ADHDer, so I’ve kind of got all of the things. Interestingly, last time we spoke, I didn’t have the autism diagnosis. I very strongly suspected, I was pretty clear, but I hadn’t actually got the diagnosis yet. So, uh, there’s a, there’s a really interesting kind of, I suppose, arc of self-discovery going on with this stuff as well. And I think it’s, it’s quite a common theme for people as well to get one and then be like, uh.

[00:02:26] Rachel: Yeah. And we, we, I mean, I know last time you described yourself as autistic, so that’s been interest, that’s interesting that you’ve only just been diagnosed. We are gonna talk about diagnosis in a minute.

[00:02:35] Rachel: It’s always good to have you on Matthew, because I think the healthcare community, we are a group of very neurodivergent individuals. Um, I’m sure people will know I was diagnosed with A, ADHD, a few only a few years ago. Um, and that diagnosis has made a massive difference to me in my life and how I manage myself and my time and everything else about my life.

[00:02:57] Rachel: But I think it can be a blessing and a curse, can’t it? We’ve, we’ve already, we’ve already talked about that before. But just before we started the podcast, you were talking to me about actually how profound neurodiversity is, just as a, a whole concept and as an idea.

[00:03:13] Matthew: I think this is one of the things that kind of gets overlooked with the whole, with, we are thinking about neurodivergent conditions and thinking of, of them as these kind of separate things. You’ve got these, this group of people who are essentially neurotypical and then a group of people who are essentially, who are neurodivergent and have a, a condition associated with that.

[00:03:32] Matthew: And fundamentally, what neurodiversity says is there is this huge, almost infinite variation in neurology and the experiences that come about as a result of neurology across the whole population. And that, that’s actually, that’s, that’s just simple biological fact, and probably an evolutionary advantage in many cases as well, because it’s persisted, persisted for so long.

[00:03:53] Matthew: But that fundamental idea, everyone is experiencing the world somewhat differently. Everyone is thinking differently, feeling differently in the world, whether or not they have a diagnosis. And even within those diagnostic categories is really quite a profound thing to engage with and I, I think it fundamentally shifts the way you see and engage with people.

[00:04:17] Matthew: And certainly thinking from a, you know, more as a psychologist, it really changes the way we think about how we do psychology, how we say things about what people are experiencing and feeling, and how much we can say and we realize that we are talking about averages rather than any one individual’s experience.

[00:04:35] Rachel: Yeah, ’cause we often use the phrase, well that’s not normal, is it? Or, you know, I’d have thought, you know, that they would’ve interpreted that like that. That’s really weird that they’d done it like that. But what does normal actually mean, I guess for anybody? Normal means their own experience really.

[00:04:49] Rachel: A few months ago, I remember I was talking to my other half about something someone had said to me. And, um, I’d interpreted it one way and when I said it, he was like, Ooh, like, he’s interpreted it a completely different way. Just that, exactly the same sentence. But in his mind it definitely meant that in my mind it definitely meant something else. And neither of us were right or wrong. It was purely an interpretation. We wouldn’t have known unless we actually asked that person what they’d, what they’d meant by it.

[00:05:17] Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it, and sometimes I find if you ask that third person, that they’ll, they’ll have their own perspective and it’ll be different to, to both of the, both of the other interpretations as well.

[00:05:26] Matthew: Um, I actually recently did some work for an organization around instructional design. Um, they were concerned about the accessibility of some of their exams, and, uh, they wanted to make sure that they were neuro accessible, so they wanted to make sure that the language they were using was as clear in its interpretation as possible.

[00:05:43] Matthew: And actually got me thinking, you know, this isn’t, this isn’t something we speak about very much in terms of how we’re, we assume that what we ask people to do. They understand what we mean very often. And that can be a huge gap. And really digging into it and all of the different kind of conditions, and also cultural background and, you know, the, this stuff spreads so far beyond just kind of neurology is, it’s like what we hear as a result of what people tell us is, is not as clear as all that.

[00:06:13] Matthew: And, and you are right. It is based in our, our own experience. And I think this is, this is one of the things that’s been emerging for me in the work around supporting neurodivergent people is actually the self-awareness of everyone. Again, if we assume everyone is having their own unique experience, we all need to be able to situate ourselves in our experience to be able to really robustly work out what other people are experiencing and convey that to other people. It’s really important to be able to reflect on our own position.

[00:06:48] Matthew: And I think this, this is a particularly difficult one, and so many people who are um, late discovery, late diagnosis, find that they just assumed that everyone experienced the world as they do. Everyone found it this difficult, they were just getting on with it, is very often the way. And what’s interesting is actually if we also experience a difficulty in that direction, we can reinforce that message for people.

[00:07:15] Matthew: So say that you were, you know, if, uh, if I’d been working with someone before I knew I was ADHD, I had ADHD, I might have said to someone who came to me and said this is difficult, I because they had something related to a DH adhd, I might have said to them, well, everyone finds it that difficult because I found it that difficult. Whereas that’s not necessarily the case. And I think that understanding that, you know, of, of, of how we experience the world differently is really, really important, because it actually helps us connect with others as well around their experience.

[00:07:45] Rachel: I guess it takes a look the judgment away as well, doesn’t it? Because I did a podcast a few months ago about the judgment you put on things, whether things are right or whether they’re wrong, and actually you could change that to whether it’s helpful or unhelpful. And actually even that’s quite judgmental and just actually changing it to behavior that works or behavior that doesn’t work, now that is the, that is really unjudgmental. And if you apply that to neurodiversity, we often think people who are neurodivergent, they’ve got it wrong, the rest of us are right or whatever. Actually, that’s not helpful either. It’s like, have I used language that is clear or not? But there’s no judgment that is clear, whatever interpretation you have, whatever way you see the world clear for someone who considers themselves neurotypical or autistic or uh, ADHD, it’s just, is it clear or not? ‘Cause there’s so many, so much nuance in everything that we say. Let’s take the judgment out.

[00:08:35] Rachel: I think that’s the main problem is that there is a, a body of people who perceive them to be normal and then everything else is abnormal. Actually, what you are saying is everyone’s just different, there’s no normal abnormal, and what we need to do is just find that, that common ground where everyone can understand things the same?

[00:08:52] Matthew: Yeah, it’s that meeting point, that intersection between our understanding. It is one of the things that actually just improving this stuff for people who are a long way to the edge of a battle curve tends to improve things for almost everyone. It’s, it’s better design. You know, your, if you, if you improve the language, you make the language simpler and clearer, you improve it for everyone. If people are in a stressful situation, they have less cognitive resources to be able to understand and, um, engage with the language that you are using. So, making it more straightforward, making it easier to interpret is gonna help them as well, regardless of whether they’re neurotypical or neurodivergent. A lot of this is actually just generally good design, it’s not for one group of people.

[00:09:40] Rachel: That makes sense. I’ve got a, a friend who’s head of, um, SEN at a local college and when she does sort of teaching observations and, and helps teachers with stuff, she’s like, well, actually, if you make this clear or if you look for this, if you help this particular learner or you develop this resources for someone who’s dyslexic or these resources for someone who might be autistic, actually those resources will be better all over, better in the end for everybody, absolutely. And I, I love that analogy that that really helps.

[00:10:08] Rachel: So we talk about good design, we talk about getting clarity on, on what we mean and being curious about how other people see the world. One thing you talked about is something you’ve been looking at a lot recently is non stereotypical presentations. And I’m really interested in that because I think when it comes to healthcare professionals, often there are some very non-stereotypical presentations.

[00:10:30] Rachel: For example, a an old cliche is, Well, I’m a doctor, I can talk to people, therefore I can’t be autistic. I mean, talk about, you know, a ridiculous belief that act absolutely isn’t true.

[00:10:39] Matthew: I think it’s, it’s really important to note that, um, the majority of research on neurodevelopmental conditions, so, you know, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourettes, that kind of cluster has been done on cisgendered white boys from a middle class background, largely in anglophone countries. So once you, you know, once you move them further, you move outside of that group, the less likely the stereotypes we hold with the way that the conditions present are likely to be true. And that, that, that has all sorts of kind of knock on problems.

[00:11:17] Matthew: And one of the interesting things is, um, this even affects medication and medication effectiveness. So one of the big challenges is like all of the research into medication and effectiveness, or almost all of it has been done on young men for a variety of reasons. But that means that we actually don’t understand the efficacy as much for women. And we, neither do we understand the efficacy of, um, of talking therapy interventions or like this, this whole range, we, we just don’t have this understanding.

[00:11:46] Matthew: We also don’t have the understanding of how these conditions are understood and present from people from different cultural backgrounds. So they can show up quite differently. And the way that people might display them can be different.

[00:11:57] Matthew: You know, one of the classic autistic traits of differences in eye contact, not making the direct eye contact, that’s also a cultural difference. It’s only the, like Europe and the US, um, and nor, uh, north America where people actually make that kind of pervasive eye contact culturally, mostly. A lot of other countries don’t have that level of intense eye contact. So that trait, you could misidentify that trait as autistic in someone who was just from a different cultural background. But that trait wouldn’t, it just wouldn’t be an indicator.

[00:12:27] Matthew: So all of these different things can make it actually very, very hard to tease apart when we are looking at these external factors. I think it’s being able to reflect on this inner experience is, is, is a much more helpful guide, but that itself is challenging because we’re so trained to look for external markers and there’s these kind of in inverted commas, objective markers. Whereas a lot of this is really phenomenological.

[00:12:54] Rachel: So. In terms of presentations that you might see in sort of really high functioning people, thinking, you know, doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, what do do you see showing up and where do we commonly think to ourselves, oh, I, I can’t possibly be near neuro divergent because actually I’m good at this and I can do this?

[00:13:14] Matthew: I, I think this is, well there’s a couple of different things. So the first of these is, um, this intersection with twice exceptionality, which is, uh, to be, and I, I, I think this whole area is somewhat problematic ’cause of the way it understands people. But this idea of being intellectually gifted as well as neurodivergent in another way, because to be intellectually gifted is to be neurodivergent. You know, you’re, you’re enough of an outlier and, and comes with its own set of problems that are very common. You know, even people who are, who don’t fit any of the other criteria for neurodivergence, but are intellectually gifted, often have a lot of similar experiences in common to other neurodivergent people.

[00:13:52] Matthew: And I, I think it’s an interesting challenge to our ideas of like, what’s a, it’s like this, the word gifted is a strange word in a way. If it comes with all of these struggles, it comes with social isolation, it comes with a whole load of different difficulties. So it, it really challenges our idea of what’s a disability? You know, what’s a deficit and what’s a strength?

[00:14:14] Matthew: And I think that is the core thing to really understand about, you know, when, when we’re, when we’re neurodivergent our strengths and relative weaknesses constellate differently. So we might be extremely strong in one area and relatively weak in another. And the difficulty is interacting with the wider world is we expect certain abilities to vary together.

[00:14:39] Rachel: So what, so you’d expect somebody who was very intellectually fit, Very intellectual, very, very clever to have very, very good social skills as well?

[00:14:47] Matthew: Even, simpler than that, like to someone who was, uh, someone who’s very bright to be able to communicate very clearly verbally, whereas you can have non-speaking or almost non-speaking people who are, you know, who would ace an IQ test, but just don’t use spoken language that way. So it can be that, that strong as a difference for some people.

[00:15:10] Matthew: And I think those, yeah, those, those ideas of what, what, a successful whatever looks like, you know, what, what is a successful doctor? You know, and how are they doing that? This is one of the really big problems is we have these stereotyped ways of achieving certain things as well. So say, you know, you’ve got a task in front of you, but there are multiple ways of achieving that, and you might do that differently to one of your colleagues. And if we get too hung up on how we achieve that, we can miss the, the multiple ways that we are all achieving this, uh, you know, ultimately achieving a goal, but, but doing it in very different ways that play to our strengths or not in, in some cases.

[00:15:53] Rachel: It’s interesting. Matthew, I’ve got, this is gonna come from a bit from left Phil, but I think. One thing I’ve noticed, one thing I’m doing a lot of talks on at the moment is this sort of superhero mentality of doctors. You know, we are absolutely capable of doing anything and everything. And, and often they are, they’re not capable of doing everything though because they haven’t got time.

[00:16:11] Rachel: But then there’s this over responsibility. And so I’m gonna work really, really hard, like as hard as I possibly can, and I’m responsible for everybody and everything. And the thought of letting other people down or dumping on colleagues is just almost painful.

[00:16:25] Rachel: In fact, we were running a, a day yesterday and one of the, the doctors said I can’t live with other people thinking I’m shirking. Like literally I can’t live with it. Now I’m beginning to think I is, is that over responsibility and this desperation to, to always be the hero for other people? Is that a neurodivergent trait?

[00:16:46] Matthew: I, it certainly can be. There’s a couple of reasons it can be particularly. And again, it can be particularly related to this high, being able to perform highly in a certain domain and being rewarded for it, and then really finding that it’s unsafe to ever fail. It’s unsafe to back off. You have to be present. You have to be there. And that can get even worse for those of us who perceive things differently and perceive therefore perceive things others don’t.

[00:17:15] Matthew: And this can be a real challenge because very often if we’re neurodivergent, we just see different aspects of the world. It’s, it’s not that we, we don’t have necessarily like more acute perception, ’cause we don’t see things other people do, but we’re just seeing from a different angle. But when we see from a different angle and that angle is relatively rare, it’s very easy to then take responsibility for everything that we perceive, because we are the only one perceiving it.

[00:17:41] Matthew: This often crosses over with these kind of hyper adapted skills and these, these skills that people have have developed. You know, the classic one of these is if people have developed hyper empathy as a skill for, you know, for connecting with people is if you’re hyper empathetic, you are likely to be doing emotional processing faster than other people. And this is quite common in, in, in a ADHDers and um, autistic people and anyone with emotional intensity might be better stated as quick emotional processing. But if you are processing faster than anyone else, you tend to end up doing all of the emotional labor in a situation. So whatever you are perceiving, whatever you are ahead of people on, it’s very, very easy to fall into that pattern of I’m the only one seeing this, therefore I’m responsible for it.

[00:18:30] Rachel: And I think when you add that to the fact that, you know, our identity is really tied up in helping people and always being there, if you then add to it that actually you might genuinely be perceiving more than other people, perceiving more need, having more empathy. then That’s just like a double whammy of feeling responsible for everybody, everything. No wonder everyone’s freaking burning out.

[00:18:51] Matthew: Yeah.

[00:18:51] Matthew: And you add that to the expectations that will have carried on from childhood. There are very few people that make it to medical professions who weren’t successful at school to some significant degree and will have had reward from that.

[00:19:03] Matthew: You know, for, for a lot of people, this is one of the, this is one of the big challenges of, um, being brighter in a non-adaptive environment is you basically can go through school, college, university, sometimes, without ever really hitting something that challenges you fully. And so you can kind of cruise, but that means that you never develop the, the tools and techniques for engaging with something.

[00:19:30] Matthew: So when you do hit the difficulty, if you think about, you know, most people have been on a, on a gradually increasing difficulty curve, so, so the next inflection point is a small change for that, whereas you hit the, the curve when it’s nearly vertical.

[00:19:44] Rachel: Yeah. Oh, that happens to me. I was, you know, A Levels fine, university, yeah, mildly hard work, but it’s fine. And it wasn’t till I got onto the wards as a junior doctor that I hit that oh my goodness, I am absolutely exhausted. I now have to organize myself. And this one particular nurse was a complete cow to me, and I did not know how to handle it. I just was not used to that type of emotional abuse or some, someone just being so intransigent and, and awful, and we hadn’t been trained in the emotional side of things. We’ve been trained in the intellectual problem solving side of things, and I was completely unprepared for it.

[00:20:18] Matthew: And I, I feel like there’s also, this is almost like the flip side of, um, the expectations that we might place on ourselves is that those can often come from other people. You know that, that expectation that because you are very good in one area and because very often because you’ve had the resources given to you to develop that skills in those areas, that it becomes almost like a moral failing or an expectation if you have needs anywhere else.

[00:20:43] Rachel: In healthcare and medicine, we are observing that, and people tell me that they’re probably a higher proportion of people who are neurodivergent from the neurotypical people. And I’m presuming, because neurodiversity actually helps us in a lot of those roles. How, how is it helping us?

[00:21:01] Matthew: I think it’s definitely helpful to think on strengths, and that can be a really good cue. One of the, one of the problems with our current diagnostic criteria is they’re all deficit based, and that can lead to mistakes in diagnosis because deficits are only half of the picture. So it’s definitely worth thinking on particular strengths and the strengths associated with particular conditions.

[00:21:27] Matthew: Particularly, you know, autism is associated in, in a, probably in a medical context with someone who is capable of synthesizing a lot of detail and coming to a singular conclusion and ADHD has a bunch of skills that are really good with coping with chaotic and unpredictable environments. So anyone who works in emergency medicine, I’d expect to be like to, to maybe have ADHD traits.

[00:21:52] Matthew: And to some degree also, uh, in general practice because of the variety of different experiences that come in. You know, you don’t know what’s going to walk through the door next, and that’s a really difficult situation for some people, but for others, it’s actually a source of interest. It, it keeps the engagement.

[00:22:10] Matthew: You know, and you see, you see that, that, that, that really high level, some people need that level of stimulus and le level of novelty, and others find it completely overwhelming. And the same with details. So it’s, I think it, again, it comes down to understanding where your particular strengths are, and for me, where they are supported and where they’re unsupported.

[00:22:30] Matthew: As very often these strengths and what we see as strengths and weaknesses are really two sides of the same coin. I like the model of sensitivities to understand this. We’re sensitive to a certain thing and that means that we can work with it to a really high degree, but it also means we are susceptible to overwhelm in that area.

[00:22:48] Matthew: A classic example of this is someone who is auditory sensitive might be a really good audio engineer. You know, they might be a great music producer, but they’re not gonna be able to cope in a really noisy environment, like a really noisy train station, that’s, that’s likely to be overwhelming for them.

[00:23:03] Matthew: So the sensitivities and the strengths are actually really closely related and making sure that we are taking care of our sensitivities and so we are not pushing ourselves into overwhelm is really, really important area. And that can be really hard when we’ve learned to rely on them. You know, it’s that reflexive thing. As soon as you get close to overwhelm, you end up in somewhere difficult. We tend to rely on the things that we are strongest at. It’s a very natural response. It’s our normal response, but that means that we can do too much of a good thing. You know, we can have too much of a good thing and we can burn through the resources that we do have.

[00:23:38] Rachel: I’d never thought of it like that before and I’d just been writing down. So if you are someone who, who has autism, um, so you can synthesize all that detail, come up with a single DI diagnostic criteria, which is brilliant for medicine. But then dealing with uncertainty, something that you, you can’t deal, you know, that there, there is no answer to, that’s really, really hard.

[00:23:59] Matthew: Potentially yes, though, you know, again, we don’t wanna stereotype too much ’cause I’m sure there are people with, but, but in general, the skills are often in that direction. And for me, I’m an autistic ADHDer, so I have this, you know, some, the, the, this is one of the weird things. It’s like I, I am a coherent person, but the way that we think about both of those conditions, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses to some degree, kind of contradict each other.

[00:24:22] Rachel: I was just thinking that actually, yeah, they’re like opposites. So like you are two opposites in, in one person, so that must be quite a jumble. But lots, lots of people are, aren’t they?

[00:24:31] Matthew: Yeah. And I, I, I think this is, this is, this gets to the, the uniqueness of it and the fact that we are all a cluster of different things, strengths, weaknesses, and we are all embodied differently. We all have different physiological things. You know, this, this, this gets to something really around co-occurrence and, you know, when we have co-occurrence things. That can really fundamentally change how different things present, how different things are experienced, whether they’re experienced as a problem or whether they’re experienced as a, as a benefit.

[00:25:02] Matthew: And there’s, there’s this whole space that we, we really need to, you know, think, again, going back to the neurodiversity idea and that the generally the idea of population diversity is if, if you have one thing, the way that another thing is going to present might be profoundly different because of that one thing. And that’s, you know, autism, ADHD is quite a good example, is part of the reason I’m late discovery is because I was always, I, I went out too much, I had too many friends. I’m too interested, like too, too out, like to be autistic. I’m also much too careful and much too like precise to be, ADHD. So I didn’t fit the stereotypes on either side.

[00:25:48] Matthew: And I think there, there, there’s also a more subtle way that we stereotype and that’s how people, how we experience people. There is a significant degree that we are associate, we, we are kind of assigning people to categories on vibes. And and there is a level of validity in that. But if our understanding of a condition is very narrow in terms of how it presents, then it’s not going to. Give us a really good steer on what happens.

[00:26:20] Matthew: And again, I have another confounding issue for both autism and ADHD is that one of my passionate interests is people. I’m fascinated by people. I’ve studied people academically and always been really interested. And that means that I engage differently to someone whose passionate interest might not be people. So people hold my attention, but that means that if you interact with me, you might not notice that I have some of the traits, even though I do because I’m interested in you because I’m interested in people, rather than because I’m relating to you in the way that perhaps a neurotypical person might.

[00:26:59] Rachel: From that then, is there any point in a diagnosis? If everybody is so different and it all interacts so differently and you can’t infer anything from one thing, you can’t say, well, if you’ve got ADHD, you’re like this, or autism are like this, what’s the point in diagnosis at all?

[00:27:15] Matthew: It’s a good question. Diagnosis does have quite a lot of value according to research. So the sooner someone is diagnosed with autism or ADHD, the better their life outcomes. Late diagnosis, an untreated ADHD is associated with really significant, uh, lifespan impact, actually.

[00:27:36] Matthew: There was some research published relatively recently in the UK that put it at seven to nine years for ADHD. Um, I’ve seen up to 12 years for ADHD and autism. So they’re really significant in terms of lifespan and quality of life, and we know that life outcomes are improved with sooner diagnosis. So there is something going on that’s helpful.

[00:28:00] Matthew: What appears to be helpful is it’s useful to differentiate between explanatory value and predictive value. So a lot of diagnosis has a huge degree of explanatory value. You can look at past experiences and go, oh, that’s why. That’s why that worked, that’s why that happened, that’s why that didn’t work. And that is really useful, but they can have much less predictive value. So being able to work out what is going to work is not so strong as a, as a value. It can to some degree, but because of all of these other intersectional things that we’ve mentioned, we don’t actually have the data to know.

[00:28:41] Matthew: I want, I think if we, if we did enough research, if we threw enough at it, we could probably get better at that, but we don’t at the moment, and we, we don’t have that level of, we just don’t conduct studies on that level. We don’t collect data on that level. We just, we just don’t have that model yet. But what it can do is it can narrow the search space, or it can at least create a more, more likely area of things that are going to work.

[00:29:09] Rachel: And from what you’ve said, everybody’s very individual anyway, with all the intersectionality of everything that you’ve got. So to be able to say, well, this is what you need to do in every really way anyway, you’ve got to just try it. But like, I love the way you said, well, it will narrow the search space. You say, well, these are the sorts of things if you have ADHD, this sort of thing can work.

[00:29:27] Matthew: Start here.

[00:29:28] Rachel: Start here. Yeah. Try this first. Try that. This may or may not help. Likewise with autism, this may or may not help, but yeah, there’s definitely not a one one size fits all approach.

[00:29:38] Matthew: No, and I, I, I think it’s, it’s, it’s really working with that and being, being comfortable with that experimental approach and being able to say it’s, it, it’s going to be about how it integrates, how any, any support, how it integrates with the rest of your life and what you’re trying to do.

[00:29:53] Rachel: I know that there are a lot of sort doctors that roll their eyes when it comes to, you know, neurodivergence. Um, I’ve seen threads on Facebook and stuff like that. Like there’s, oh, I’m fed up of everyone wanting to get diagnosed with this, wanting to get diagnosed with that. Honestly, everyone’s gonna have diagnosis these days, lots and lots of eye rolling and stuff like that.

[00:30:11] Rachel: I can see their point ’cause I think everyone, every man and his dog is now identifying like that. But I think that probably just means that actually it’s just so common and it’s so helpful, and maybe the eye rolling is because people see diagnosis as either an excuse for them or a, well, I think gen people are genuinely looking for that, um, explanations, that explanations of what’s been going on all their life, so they’re looking for it, but they’re also looking for perhaps a bit of a quick fix that if I’m diagnosed, someone can fix me and it’s all gonna be all right. And that in my experience, very rarely happens.

[00:30:47] Matthew: Yeah, and I, I, I think this is, you know, there’s a, there is an element of this being a diagnostic pathway. And part of a diagnostic pathway is eliminating the most likely thing first. And we do know that ADHD is dramatically underdiagnosed. I think, if I remember rightly, it’s about a quarter of a million people who are medicated for ADHD, but ADHD is probably about two and a half percent of the population. So that means that it, we are under medic. It only about one in 10 are actually taking medication for ADHD, whether or not that’s desirable, you know, but, but so there, there are significant underdiagnosis and particularly in populations where this hasn’t been, fitted the stereotype, and there’s a real risk here of simply not listening to people from marginalized and minoritized groups about their lived experience, which is, is unfortunately a failure mode that we have seen in, in, in medicine for a long time.

[00:31:47] Matthew: And, and again, you can have two sides of this. It’s either someone that shares none of your lived experience and you really don’t understand what they’re struggling with. But it can also be that you are undiagnosed and that you are struggling and you just assume this is normal and it isn’t.

[00:32:00] Matthew: This is one of the things I often, I often say to people is, if everyone around you is getting diagnosed, you should look into whether you have that condition yourself,

[00:32:09] Rachel: Yes. ’cause you sort of flock together, don’t you?

[00:32:12] Matthew: because every, like the wider population, everyone and everyone is not getting diagnosed. There’s a significant sample bias going on if that’s your experience.

[00:32:21] Rachel: I’m just wondering maybe just the, the problem is actually the word diagnosed. Because I think what doctors don’t like is the fact that everyone’s walking around thinking there’s something wrong with them, that they’ve got an ill, they’ve got an illness, and the minute you tell someone they’re ill or they’ve got a, an illness, they then take an ill role or a sick role or, you know, or that’s our perception that that’s what happens.

[00:32:40] Rachel: So the idea that you have to be diagnosed with a disorder, so then you’ve suddenly got like 10% of the population or whatever having a, a disorder, when actually what we wanna be doing is promoting health and proposing promoting healthy behavior and healthy living. So. I don’t know. Is there, is there a different way of saying, rather than we are gonna diagnose you with, with a neurodivergent problem or condition? It’s actually we’re, what we’re doing is recognizing the way that your brain works and.

[00:33:09] Matthew: Well, I, I tend to use condition because it is more neutral than disorder. It is a condition in, in the scientific sense, in, in the way that like an experimental condition is a different condition, it’s a different set of, of things. And you might have noticed I say discovery as well as diagnosis, and discovery is, is more on that identity and personal identity side. And what’s interesting for me is when we discover, you know, when we are seeing a situation where, where waiting lists for things like ADHD are, are absolutely huge at the moment. You know, adult ADHD, I think the average in this country is something like eight years now.

[00:33:47] Rachel: The waiting list for eight years,

[00:33:48] Matthew: Yes. Mental health services has always been underfunded and under-resourced. And this, and now a lot of people are realizing they might have ADHD, they are significantly under, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s become it really, really big issue. And if we think about the life scale impact of that, we are not supporting people in the way that we could support people.

[00:34:13] Matthew: And what interesting for me is how much we can do before diagnosis. And actually, you know, in terms of things like stimulant medication, that needs diagnosis, that needs careful management, that can have really big downsides. They can be habit forming, they can be abused. They have all sorts of different problems, so most ADHD people find it hilarious that people talk about them addictive because they forget to take them very often.

[00:34:35] Matthew: But that there’s this, this challenge around like, what can we do about it? And it’s really about how you can be supported better. One of the other flip sides of that is we, you know, as a culture, we need an explanation if someone needs accommodation or support, and this is around work, is like, why do we not just listen to people’s reported experience about what they think is better for them?

[00:34:58] Matthew: If we had more flexible services and more flexible support and more flexible work where people just got their support needs met and we met a wider range of support needs, by default, we’d have less need for identifying people who then need to justify their support because that’s where a lot of this comes from.

[00:35:19] Rachel: Essentially it’s saying, and I’m just thinking they’re the same for mums, you have to justify the reason why you can’t work eight till six in the way that a white male can who has a wife at home looking after all their kids in, in a British, you know, exactly. It’s all set up for that step, that person, and then there’s no flex around it unless you have something that’s maybe, yeah, enshrined in law now you have to legislate to get any protection. But it’s mad, isn’t it? Just like if you gave working conditions actually worked best for the person.

[00:35:49] Matthew: Yeah. If we move to a more person-centered position, that’s it. It becomes much easier. And I accept that, you know, doing things in a person-centered way can seem quite resource intensive, but I feel, I mean, it increases efficacy so much that it’s worth it, and it also just means involving the person, the groups of people that you’re working with in the way that we understand the thing and the way that we work with the thing.

[00:36:14] Matthew: Unfortunately,

[00:36:16] Matthew: psychiatry in particular has a history of making other people comfortable. Not the person who has the condition but the people around them. It’s the distress in others that interventions, medication have really been primarily about, rather than the the experience of the individual.

[00:36:37] Matthew: And so I think when we move to this, actually, what is good for you as an individual? How do we understand this? Me? Isn’t it like you as an individual and us collectively? That’s a much more useful question and it changes the whole complexion of how we are looking at this.

[00:36:51] Matthew: And again, this comes back to this fundamental idea of neurodiversity. We are not trying to make people normal. There are, there are, there’s a middle of the bell curve, but there isn’t an ideal. There isn’t a perfect, it’s, it’s about a range of different, you know, it, it, it’s that range of difference that’s actually the feature that’s that what we want out outta society.

[00:37:16] Matthew: So, so trying to normalize can be actually the problem here. And that can also lead to normalization for normalization’s sake, you know, so it is this, this mitigation thing where if there’s a perceived deficit is we spend a lot of effort addressing that deficit so that someone can achieve a kind of mediocrity.

[00:37:40] Matthew: We are moving people back to a very flat skill, you know, but instead we’d be better focusing on the strength. So for me, whilst deficits do matter and can really get in the way, they only get in the way when they get in the way of things that we want to achieve,

[00:37:53] Rachel: And there’s that old adages isn’t there? Yeah, if you play your strength, if you invest money in developing your strengths, you’ll get a much better bang for your buck than if you just like, yeah. Like you said, focused on trying to make something that you find really difficult doing it.

[00:38:05] Matthew: When we talk about that, we often mean for quite a narrow range of strengths. That being the difficulty and, and, and this, this experience of having really extraordinary strengths can be very common for, for neurodivergent people and particularly for, you know, if, if there’re a neuro people listening in, in the audience of this particular podcast, when, when we talk about masking, we often seem to think about it as a, as as weakness. You know, it is like papering over the cracks, but very often for high performing people, it’s it’s strengths that you mask. You don’t say the thing that you are seeing because you know that other people get uncomfortable when you point that out. You know, you were, you were a junior and you weren’t supposed to see the thing that the person teaching you missed. That’s not socially acceptable, so you learn not to say it. Those are the kind of things that we often cover up.

[00:38:55] Matthew: So I think that ability to fully locate in our strengths does require a supportive environment, and requires a degree of emotional capability in those around us to be able to cope with the idea that there are people seeing things that they are not seeing.

[00:39:11] Rachel: I think there’s a flip side though, Matthew. I think there is, and I’m gonna bring up the elephant in the room, that, you know, I was talking to someone the other day who, they have a, a junior doctor who is not capable of doing the job. She, I don’t think she’s neurodiverse, so there’s some other reason, but she’s just sort of keep, keeping on going, keeping demanding this, that, the other thing, you know, making everyone run around, make her, you know, and actually she’s just not doing the job.

[00:39:36] Rachel: And there are some jobs that you actually have to be capable in certain areas to do. And I think people sort of, of of my age, I’m nearing 50 now, um, we are, we are Gen X, we’ve got these millennials coming up below, and the, there’s a big culture clash between Gen X, they’ve just worked so hard working their arses off, had this over responsibility, feel they should do everything and just work harder and harder, there’s the millennials that realize how important it’s to protect their work life balance and put more boundaries around.

[00:40:05] Rachel: But then sometimes we see people that genuinely need adaptions in their work asking for them, but thinking, well actually, if you can’t do that bit of your job and you’re asking for this, well, who’s gonna do the rest of rest of it? And how flexible can we be if someone is genuinely because of their exceptionality in a role that they can’t fulfill, how much, how much contortion can we do to make that okay for that person?

[00:40:29] Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think there’s a, there’s a number of different ways to approach this having, but starting with there are fundamen fundamental capability baselines. We want to make sure that people are capable of doing what we want them to do and what we need them to do.

[00:40:49] Matthew: But what we do need to be careful about is whether they are actually supported in doing those things, how they are doing those things and whether they might use a different method because we want an outcome. We need to be more flexible about the method.

[00:41:05] Matthew: So that can be, that can be a real problem, is if your, you know, if your strengths lie in a certain direction, you might approach a problem differently to someone else, but that’s still valid in terms of outcome.

[00:41:16] Matthew: The other thing we need to look at is whether the roles, when we think of an overall job role, is whether that actually that cluster of skills go together for everyone. Is there a set of really valuable things that person could be doing, but that just don’t cluster together in the same way as we expect them to do? Which becomes more of a bureaucratic challenge. And again, there are bureaucratic limits and we do have to do some of this.

[00:41:43] Matthew: But that idea, that skills all cluster together in a certain way is related to what I was talking about earlier. And, and, and you can, you know, if you’ve got skills that cross over different domains, if you can find a role that fits, that can be an incredibly valuable role.

[00:42:00] Matthew: Often see people, and particularly with ADHD traits actually, because of the, the kind of connected thinking and the, the, the, the difference in like the wanting to follow different areas is end up in a kind of go-between role where you are translating from one domain to another domain, which is incredibly value valuable because we need those links.

[00:42:22] Matthew: So if someone has a set of skills where you can link up two different domains, but you’re not using them ’cause you’ve got people in this box or that box, then that can be a real missed opportunity.

[00:42:33] Rachel: Yeah, we do, as doctors expect ourselves to feel, fulfill an incredibly diverse role within, within one role. So I’m thinking, you know, maybe a, a physician, you’ve got an on-call rotor that you’ve got to do, you’ve then got to your clinics and your diagnosis, you’ve got to do your research and stuff. Um, and then, you know, in order to get out the on-call rotor, you have to have a doctor’s note or something saying you can’t, and it makes the people who have to carry on with the on-call rotor incredibly frustrated and resentful actually. ‘Cause they’re like, well, well, how can we have to, but this person is shirking their response, we can’t do it. But actually, if we had a, a load of different roles within that department saying actually there’s a clinic role, there’s an on-call role. There’s this, you can choose what’s gonna suit you

[00:43:12] Rachel: . I had a, another person who was on one of our courses and she said, she said, I would love, she was a GP. I would love just to do everyone’s admin for them. I would love to do all the results and all the letters and everything and, and half the people the course were going I would love you to do that. I love doing the emergency clinic, but I role, we don’t create roles like that. So it’s about, I guess it’s, it’s creativity, isn’t it, in the workplace.

[00:43:35] Matthew: Yeah. And I, I, I think that idea of being able to play to strengths and preferences, you know, we have, unfortunately, and this is kind of a, a British cultural thing, that work is kind of a struggle quite a lot of the time that we have essentially paid to suffer.

[00:43:49] Rachel: That is so true.

[00:43:51] Matthew: and it’s not a healthy way to approach high performance. It comes from, you know, like working in Victorian mills, I think. Um, and, and we, it, it’s just not a healthy way for us to approach you. And when we’re talking about we want, we’d be better thinking about professions, learning from things like sport, like high performing sports. We want our, we want doctors to be high

[00:44:13] Rachel: You stick to the javelin, you do the high jump. Stop. Stop trying to jump over that when you’re supposed to be

[00:44:19] Matthew: Exactly, exactly that.

[00:44:20] Rachel: Oh that, you know, it’s such a different way of thinking, isn’t it? But I think you’re right. It’s the way our systems are set up. But the problem is what happens is that then pits people against each other because then people get upset and then, well, I’ve got to do that, why don’t they have to do that? But actually if, okay, well we’ll pay to do that, that bit, that bit over there. If you don’t do that bit, you get paid differently, you get paid to do this bit or whatever, then everyone starts working as a team rather than gets resentful about, well how come you get off on that? And are you using your neurodiversity as a neurodiversity, as an excuse, or why should I be inconvenienced? That’s the problem I think.

[00:44:53] Rachel: I think a lot of people think, why should I be inconvenienced ’cause we are having to make a allowances for you. And that’s the problem. It just shouldn’t be like that, should it?

[00:45:02] Matthew: Everyone should be, we, we should always be adapting this way, one way or the other. You know, it’s like everyone. It’s, it’s not about making allowances. It’s about accepting that everyone’s different and has different strengths and interests. And if we support those and let people use those, we get more out of them.

[00:45:17] Rachel: Which is why we circled back to what we first started talking about, that everybody is neurodiverse, so we need to be thinking, even if we don’t feel that we have a, a different condition, actually how do I, how do I work best within this environment that I’m in? Even if you don’t have autism or ADHD or dyslexia or anything else, you’ll still have strengths and weaknesses and things that you want to, you need to actually develop and work to and other things that you really hate. So just don’t do that anymore.

[00:45:44] Matthew: You are allowed. I, I think it is this, this, this association between having a, having a diagnosis and being allowed to be a human with, with specific needs and experiences and preferences. That feels like the, the, the problem here to some degree.

[00:46:03] Matthew: And we are implicitly chasing this kind of idealized person when we do this, we are, we are, you know, as you mentioned, it’s, it’s the straight white, neurotypical label, bodied middle class man. But it’s even, even then, it’s an idealized version of that person who almost no one is going to com, you know, be, be that like anyway.

[00:46:23] Matthew: And it, it is this kind of Superman figure and it’s not helpful for anyone. You know, we, we we have to accept humanity, limitation, and the way that humans are, and design systems and services that reflect that. It’s the systems and services that are the problem. If they’re not, you know, it’s, it, it’s, it’s a design problem on some very fundamental level. If we are pushing people to the limit or over their limits in a system that’s supposed to deliver something, that’s a problem, that’s a, you know, that’s, that’s not a necessary function of deli of the outcome. That’s a probably implicit decision that was made in how we meet that outcome.

[00:47:06] Rachel: What tips would you give to people who are working in this really complex system that really needs to change and should change and ought to change, but we are not in control of that, so we are only in control of what we can do and there are things that we can do individually. What would your sort of three top tips be for actually, what can you do to make things better for yourself?

[00:47:26] Matthew: Yeah, I, I, I think the most important thing about any of this change stuff is start with what you have. Don’t get too hung up on an idealized, potential future. Look at what you know, what you have, how it all hangs together and what you want to do, what the context is. And without having to take a huge leap, without having to build a huge amount of stuff, move in the direction you want to do. You’ll find that, you know, you can push an edge, you can move towards an edge in that direction, almost certainly with what you have already.

[00:48:00] Matthew: And actually that’s a significant degree how systems change. There’s a lot of how, you know, things like a, a large organization changes is it’s constructed in the individual behaviors of a whole load of different people. There isn’t, like on some level, organizations are a fiction. They’re just a bunch of people doing stuff. And, and so if you can change. What everyone does, then you fundamentally change how the organization functions.

[00:48:25] Matthew: It’s really about running small experiments, running small tests to see, you know, what can you do differently? And in fact, if you are exploring neurodivergence as a possibility, this is a really a good way of, of exploring that. Because if you, if you have a high, you have a hypothesis, say I’ve listened to this and maybe I have a DH adhd, or I think I resonate with a lot of this, I, I wonder if I have ADHD.

[00:48:49] Matthew: One of the ways you can explore that is to go on a very long waiting list, you know, and, and try and get support that way. But another way is to go, is to think, well what, what helps? What has helped a lot of people with ADHD? Where are my experiences coinciding with that and what can I do about it? And use that as an experiment. Just a very small intervention. If that works, that supports the hypothesis that you have ADHD. Because if the things that help ADHDers help you, there’s a good chance that you’ll share some of that lived experience.

[00:49:25] Matthew: And so the more you do that, the clearer you get on where you are. So it’s, it’s really iterating towards that understanding instead of making it that categorical thing of like ADHD, and it means this not ADHD. And it means that. And that gives you the nuance as well. ’cause you run these experiments over time. So it’s like, oh, in these circumstances, yeah, this is true. But in those circumstances, it’s not. It’s building up that overall picture through kind of small experiments of yourself and the relationship to the world.

[00:49:57] Matthew: And if you are in charge of organizations, this is also a very effective way of developing organizational capabilities is to do this in this small, repeated way rather than trying to kind of understand and solve everything and act. So you are letting, you’re letting the world give you feedback. You’re letting the world think for you to some degree, instead of having to kind of take this incredible, complex, overwhelming amount of information and come to a decision about it.

[00:50:24] Rachel: And you’re gonna have to do that anyway, aren’t you? ’cause even if a psychiatrist says, yes, you have ADHD, or yes, you, you have autism and this is what you should do, well you’re gonna then have to try that. And you’re not just going to swallow it hook, line, and sinker, ’cause you’re still gonna go, well that doesn’t work. So you might sort of done that already.

[00:50:40] Matthew: What does this mean, you know, to me? And I think, you know, we do, at the moment, we do diagnose people, particularly if you’re an adult and it’s broadly like, great, here’s this. Maybe if, if you’re in one of the more, um, resourced services, you might get a couple of leaflets and an invite to a, um, a support group, maybe, uh, uh, like a facilitator group that meets a few times and has a cup of coffee. That’s the absolute most I’ve ever seen.

[00:51:06] Matthew: So making sense of this stuff, making sense of what it means to you in your context is a huge amount of stuff that’s left to you. And yeah, like you say, you can do that. It, you can do the sense making first and allow that to go with the label, rather than going I need the label before I can start making sense of this experience, using that as a potential lens, and understanding when it is a useful lens and when it isn’t. ‘Cause even once you have a diagnosis, it’s not the only thing about you as a person, so you need to be able to discern when it’s a relevant explanation and when it isn’t.

[00:51:43] Rachel: And I was just thinking actually you play to your straight to that. Like if you’ve got ADHD, you could think of like 20 different ADHD things you could try and try them like I was, and I thought, oh, that’s very, that would really appeal to my ADHD.

[00:51:54] Matthew: Yeah, I think your difficulty with ADHD will be doing it more than once.

[00:51:58] Rachel: Yeah, that’s true. Like, oh, that worked. Well, let’s just go into the next thing. But honestly, when I realized I had ADHD was when I had listened to someone talk about it, I was like, oh, that’s interesting. I never thought in before. And then I just listened to a podcast and he’s like, these are the top seven strategies to someone with ADHD and I was like, yep, yep, yep. I was like, oh my God. I do, I, I know from experiment, I need to do all of those, and maybe that’s why I’ve got into all this sort of self-help stuff. But absolutely just try stuff. Try stuff now you even suspect you’ve got ADHD or your autistic. Try it. Try it straight away.

[00:52:33] Matthew: and I think actually going back to where we started to some degree, particularly if you were a high performer at school and you’ve got this reputa, you’ve kind of internalized this idea to seek permission for everything, and I think we need to be very careful about whether what we are really doing is just seeking permission instead of being able to take on something and say, yeah, this is, you know, taking it on for ourselves and saying, actually this is something I can just do and I don’t need to ask someone else’s permission, to explore how I experience the world, what it means to be me.

[00:53:08] Rachel: And not just permission, I think it’s about some external validation as well. Do we, do we need external validation of this stuff?

[00:53:16] Matthew: I think it’s useful. We, we, we only understand ourselves in the context of other people really identity, you know, we think about identity as something located in, in ourselves. It isn’t really, it’s located in our relationships, in that web of relationships. What we need to be careful about is, is any one relationship, you know, and, and, and being like, putting it all on, on one aspect of identity.

[00:53:37] Matthew: So we, we do understand our experience in relation to others, and there’s value in sharing our experience with others, particularly when they share our, when, when, when, when we experience things in similar ways, because you all have solved things that I haven’t solved, and I’ll have solved things that you haven’t.

[00:53:54] Matthew: So being able to share and develop, this is actually a really, really important way of improving and being able to not have to do everything from scratch ourselves. Because that’s the, that’s the key with this, is how, how can we meet our own needs as a unique individual, but without having to do everything from first principles?

[00:54:15] Rachel: And we are so lucky there’s so many podcasts out there about, about these things. There’s so many YouTube videos, so many books. So just find the book, find the podcast, go really deep into it, which, you know, our special skills probably mean that we can do that, right?

[00:54:28] Matthew: Yeah. And, and I think follow you, follow your interest in this. Is, is, is if it has energy for you, what aspects of it have energy for you? What needs aren’t being met right now? You know, it is like, is this a professional thing? Is it that you are bored? Is it that you are creatively unsatisfied? What is it that’s missing? And again, you don’t need permission to meet that need. You can go and look for it yourself, and that’s okay. Even if it’s not, what other people who you know, fit some of your other identities would do.

[00:55:02] Rachel: Matthew, what resources would you recommend if someone is wandering and wants to explore that? Are there any good books or particularly good things for starting to look at any of this?

[00:55:11] Matthew: I think in general, I would suggest look to resources created by people who have that lived experience and see how much you resonate with those experiences. There’s a real element that which we kind of know our own, whether or not, you know, we, we can kind of sense it in other people without necessarily consciously being aware, but we can kind of, I I, I sometimes heard it described as neurodivergent peer review. is, is, is you just kind of know someone’s experiencing the world like you.

[00:55:43] Matthew: If someone describes an experience that resonates for you, follow it up and have a look and go with whatever form works for you as well. You don’t have to do this a specific way. If you like podcasts, find some podcasts about it. You like videos, go to YouTube. If you like books, you know, it, it, you get the picture. It’s like, and if you like, if you’re primarily interacting and talking to people, find a group of people and be open about your situation. Say, I’m exploring this. People are usually very, very happy to share their experience with someone else they think who, who thinks they might have that going with humility and, and like, I’m, I’m learning and understanding, people will share a huge amount, very generously usually.

[00:56:23] Matthew: So I think just explore, follow the thread and don’t be worried if that thread then goes nowhere. You can always pick up another thread, but follow the thread that comes up for you.

[00:56:33] Rachel: Well, Matthew, we’ve, we’ve, we could talk on and on forever, couldn’t we? We’ll have to get you back another time. Um, if people want to hear more about you and your work, how can they find out more?

[00:56:43] Matthew: Yeah. So you can find pretty much everything I do at matthewringer.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn where I post quite a lot and I’ve also just started on Bluesky, so hopefully that’ll carry on. I dunno whether that will stick but started.

[00:56:58] Matthew: So yeah, that, those are the main areas people can find all of my different work, um, and information about working with me one-to-one as an organization and the community I run called Curious Being as well. So there’s, there’s a whole load of different ways that, that you can interact. Um, and I’m always happy just to chat to people if you’ve got any kind of questions or anything that that’s come up for you, always happy to, you know, talk to someone, point you in the right direction, share specific resources if you are, you know, if you do want a pointer.

[00:57:30] Rachel: That’s wonderful. And Matthew, I think you’re coming to be one of our speakers hopefully at our, um, Work Well Live conference on the 21st of May. That’s for any senior healthcare professionals, leaders, managers, coaches, mentors, anyone in healthcare who manages, leads, people, and, and wants to really look at how we help people work happier and beat burnouts, but without burning out yourself. ‘Cause as a leader we can do that. So you might feel like you might be neuro reverse yourself. You might think that there’s some, um, neurodivergent people in your team. There probably are. FYI, there almost certainly are in your team. So come along, talk to Matthew and, um, yeah, come, come along to that event, it’s gonna be really interesting and we’re gonna be think about a, a really, really different way of fostering wellbeing and resilience. So Matthew, thank you so much for being on the podcast and we’ll, we’ll speak to you again soon, hopefully.

[00:58:18] Matthew: Yeah. Super. Thank you very much.

[00:58:20]

[00:58:21] Rachel: Thanks for listening. Don’t forget, you can get extra bonus episodes and audio courses along with unlimited access to our library of videos and CPD workbooks by joining FrogXtra and FrogXtra Gold, our memberships to help busy professionals like you beat burnout and work happier. Find out more at youarenotafrog.com/members.